


A True Artist

by domesticadventures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Headspace, i am fairly certain this is not what most people have in mind when they think of artist!dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 17:11:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4633446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domesticadventures/pseuds/domesticadventures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the months after his mother dies, Dean doesn’t talk, but he draws.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A True Artist

In the months after his mother dies, Dean doesn’t talk, but he draws. He takes the memories seared into his mind and matches the colors to crayons and colored pencils, hoards the blacks and reds and oranges and uses them to create picture after crude picture of a human form crumbling to ash in the flames as he tries to forget what it feels like to inhale smoke.

His teacher says, “Oh, how pretty and colorful!”

When Dean starts crying and can’t be comforted, she doesn’t know what else to do, so she calls his father.

John doesn’t pick him up from school any sooner than he has to. As soon as they get in the car, he crumples up the drawing. He says, “Stop crying.”

Dean internalizes this in the same way he does everything: quietly.

From then on, he buries his feelings the best way he knows how: he draws nothing but happy smiling perfect nuclear families.

His teachers praise him for those drawings, too. He refuses to put them in his backpack. Instead, he presses the pictures into his teacher’s hands. A silent plea: _You keep it._

Five years old and he’s already learning there’s more than one way to tell a lie.

\--

Dean learns to do other things with his hands, later. Paints walls and floors and dark alleys with the blood of monsters who still bleed the same color they did back when they were still human. Salts and burns so many corpses that he almost convinces himself that must be the reason he’s so intimately familiar with the anatomy of a fire.

Point is, he puts those fine motor skills to better use: wraps his deft hands around the hilt of a blade, the grip of a gun, the wheel of a car.

He’s good at all of those things, too.

His father doesn’t praise him for them, either.

\--

It’s almost infuriating how inaccurate the drawings in John’s journal are. Dean’s pretty sure this isn’t the sort of job where someone should be taking artistic liberties.

He suspects he could do better. Start his own catalogue of hunts, recreate everything he sees in perfect detail. Make something that could actually be used to help his peers or his successors rather than send them on wild goose chases.

He considers the prospect so seriously that he actually sits down with a fresh journal, intent on getting started.

As soon as he picks up the pencil, he inexplicably feels bile rising in his throat. He puts it down.

He drinks himself to sleep.

\--

It’s amazing, the things you can learn from a true master.

It’s no longer human, the thing strung up on the rack, the soul blackened and twisted beneath the canvas of its own blood and viscera.

“Mmm,” Alastair says, surveying Dean’s work with obvious delight. “A true artist.”

\--

He buries his feelings deep, pushes them down down down until they never see the light of day, until nothing can reach them from the surface. It’s only his subconscious that betrays him, now, only his dreams that taunt him, offering him visions like his childhood drawings brought to life, mother and father and children all happy healthy smiling.

Sometimes it’s harder to rouse him than it should be, not the split second shift to consciousness that might save his life but instead a slow rise to the surface, a fight he makes every morning with no one there to pull him up.

It’s no wonder he wakes up gasping.

 


End file.
